


Let Me Call It By Name

by ehmazing



Category: Hadestown - Mitchell
Genre: F/M, Getting Back Together, Greek Mythology - Freeform, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-07
Updated: 2018-01-07
Packaged: 2019-03-01 03:29:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13286040
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ehmazing/pseuds/ehmazing
Summary: The story ends, the seasons change, and Persephone keeps trying to fix what's broken.





	Let Me Call It By Name

**Author's Note:**

  * For [meredyd](https://archiveofourown.org/users/meredyd/gifts), [Operamatic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Operamatic/gifts), [singasong119](https://archiveofourown.org/users/singasong119/gifts).



> Amazing fanworks inspired by this fic!! <3
> 
> \- [ending scene fanart by @doorwaytoparadise](https://loversdesireinterlude.tumblr.com/post/169606975553/and-whisper-something-in-his-ear-that-even-those)
> 
> \- [section-by-section fanmix by Johanna](https://8tracks.com/ellingtonchimay/let-me-call-it-by-name)

_Speaking of loving you, I do_  
_I'm telling you stranger to stranger_  
_Whatever changes come to you_  
_I'm telling you changer to changer_

—Anais Mitchell, [“Changer”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9AG6OYEjF0)

 

* * *

 

**I.**

 

That first spring, the first spring in so long that doesn’t feel like the burst of steam escaping from a kettle, like a roll of water breaking through a dam, fast and hot and free free free again, her husband walks her to the station and waits with her for the train. They stand an arm’s width apart, Hades tall and broad and sternly upright, Persephone hunched over the weight of her valise and shivering in the cold March wind. She’d like to sit, but the Hadestown station platform doesn’t have any benches. It doesn’t need to. It was built to serve only one passenger twice a year.

Her husband checks the time, glaring into the watch face, jaw clenched tight. She’s spent all last night and the car ride over and the last fifteen minutes trying to think of a conversation they could have. When she was a little younger, they’d use this time for one final shouting match before she’d stomp up the station stairs and tell him to rot in his grave. When she was much younger than that, they’d be necking until the whistle blasted them apart.

 _Maybe there’s nothing left to talk about after all this time,_ she thinks. _Maybe we’ve just run out of words._

Wheels rolling in the distance, a long wail stretching down the tracks. Hades tucks his watch back into his pocket, shaking his coat straight again.

“Late,” he grunts.

Persephone wonders if he’d jump if she just started screaming. Or if she started necking him, if he’d kiss her back.

The conversation she’s been trying to create grinds down to, “Don’t feed the dogs under the table, they’ll get sick. And don’t punish the maids for cleaning your office. Keeping all that paper piled up in there will start a fire one of these days.” She heaves her luggage through the narrow train car door, tugging her coat tighter around herself. “Well…”

“Well,” her husband says, hands in his pockets, eyes cold and clear and fixed miserably on her face, “safe trip, then.”

She nods. He nods back. It’s better than telling him to rot, but not nearly as satisfying.

When she gets home, her mother gives her a stern, scrutinizing look. “You’re late,” she snaps, snatching the valise from Persephone’s hand and hanging her hat on the sagging old coat rack. “You’re never this late.”

“I’m not the goddess of trains, Ma,” is all she says as she trudges up the stairs. She doesn’t even bother to kick off her shoes before slumping onto her too-small, too-pink kid bed, burrowing under the lace-trimmed pillows.

 _You’ve got to try,_ she scolds herself, sighing heavily. _You’re got to try harder than that._

 

* * *

 

**II.**

 

Once upon a time, before the beginning of every other story, Persephone didn’t hate her mother’s house or her mother’s fields or her mother’s incessant cheerful whistle at the crack of dawn every single morning. She got out of bed long before noon and set up the fruit stand without complaint. She wore dresses that had been hemmed and re-hemmed a hundred times, patched and darned until practically none of the original pattern remained, and she didn’t think anything about anyone but herself.

There was a man who came to the market once a week, every week. He never bought the same thing, but what he did buy he bought all of, sliding mountains of coins and towers of bills over the splintered wooden counter into her hands. He never let her give him back any change.

“Are you ever going to ask me to dinner?” she finally dared one day as they watched his driver try to fit ten boxes of carrots into the backseat of his black car. Persephone knew, instinctively, that he wasn’t going to eat a single one. She at least hoped he wouldn’t let them rot. “Or offer to walk me home?”

The man shoved his hands into his pockets, looking sheepish as a box overturned and spilled a mound of dirty vegetables onto his clean leather seats. “I don’t think your mother likes me much.” Over his shoulder, Demeter was indeed shucking corn as if it had personally insulted her. “I don’t want to get you in trouble.”

“I’m already trouble,” Persephone said, and it wasn’t true in the slightest. She’d never snuck out in her entire life. She’d never even broken curfew. The man laughed, so maybe he could tell. Or maybe he couldn’t. But when he laughed it sounded like some kind of music, like a river roaring over rapids or wheat bending in the wind, and she knew, _This is the man I’m going to marry._ When he walked her home that night she had already started planning how she’d steal him away.

But she wasn't trouble back then, and she didn't know how to be. They ran away. They got caught. And the rest, as they say, is history.

 

* * *

 

**III.**

 

Now she’s much better at sneaking around. It’s a bad idea to invite the girl over to the main house, so Persephone goes through the trouble of turning the place upside-down searching for the misplaced key to her office. When she finally fishes it out of a sad-looking stocking stuffed in the back of a drawer, Hades has begun to look suspicious. But she announces she’s taking the dogs out and he just grunts and returns to reading the paper with one hand and letting his coffee go cold in the other.

The walk downtown takes much longer than she remembers. In her absence Hades seems to have either pushed all of the factories further away, or shifted their house higher onto the hill, or perhaps both. The air is stale and cold, biting at her cheeks as she walks despite there being no wind. The dogs’ breath steams from their red mouths, tongues lolling as they tug her along through the dark, winding streets.

When Eurydice arrives, Persephone is still attempting to will away the mounds of dust that have accumulated on her bookshelves. She tries on her most queenly smile as the girl glances fearfully at the dogs.

“Sit, sit! No, don’t worry about them.” The mutts are snoring in a heap by the fireplace, legs kicking in their sleep. “They’re the laziest watchmen on our payroll. They don’t even chase rabbits anymore.”

That’s a lie—the dogs do chase rabbits and often kill them just for sport. But Eurydice edges into the room, perching carefully on the peeling armchair Persephone offers, her shoes tracking coal dust across the floor. Her skin is ashen, but she’s filled out some. Her arms are no longer bone-thin and bulge with muscle at the shoulders. She’s well-fed and healthy, despite everything, for Hades may be a tyrant but he’s a tyrant who keeps his word.

“Am I in trouble, ma’am?” she asks. Regardless of the tired hunch of her back and the shadows under her eyes, her voice is still as sweet and clear as a ringing bell. “If there’s a problem with my hours, you could’ve sent me to the foreman’s office, I know where it is and how to—”

“There’s no problem. I’m just—” Feeling guilty? Feeling responsible? Feeling like somehow this is all her own fault to begin with? “—checking in. Boss’ job, you know.” _That’s it? Oh, boy._

Eurydice drums her fingers on her knees. “Oh. Well, thank you. I’m doing alright, I suppose.” Persephone wishes the girl didn’t have such dark, knowing eyes. “To be honest, ma’am, I didn’t know you were in charge of us too.”

Persephone feels her jaw twitch. “Of course I am. I own half of this. Half of the whole place.” She sits up straighter in her chair, trying to pretend the office looks used instead of cluttered. “I’m head of the books too. Goddess of Binding. My name’s at the bottom of every contract, if you take a closer look.”

“Really?” Eurydice is cowed now. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know. We didn’t—um, I didn’t work much before I came down. Not real jobs with contracts, at least.” Her fingers stop drumming. “Ma’am, I really am grateful for all you’ve done. Really. It was kind of you to help us, even though—” she swallows, “—even though it didn’t work out. Thank you.”

Persephone feels worse than ever. Her skin is practically crawling with the itch of guilt, guilt, guilt. “Don’t thank me,” she says. “Like I said, it’s my job. Is there anything else I could do for you, to make you more comfortable here? I can pull any strings you like. Sneak something under the table, too, if you’re thirsty.”

 _Don’t ask me about him,_ she prays. _Whatever you ask for, don’t ask me that. You don’t want the answer and neither do I._

Eurydice asks, “Could you bring me something from my garden?”

Persephone blinks.

“You’re remembering when we lived by the station, or on the road. We had a cottage before that,” Eurydice murmurs, her eyes looking far, far away. “It had white shutters and a dark green door. ‘Course, it wasn’t really ours, but it was empty when we got there and we were the ones who fixed it up. I had a vegetable garden with tomatoes, the most beautiful tomatoes in the whole damn world. Rounder and redder than the sun.”

Her eyes fix slowly back on Persephone again and she summons a thin smile. “They all shriveled up when the dust storms came. Still shriveled now too, I expect. He never had much of a green thumb. But I know you could fix them up. Could you bring me one, please? I’d like to taste them again.”

“Of course,” Persephone says. “Tomatoes won’t be any trouble at all.”

The distance stretches between the town and the house, gravel biting at the bottom of her heels. She’s panting by the time she gets home, face flushed from the chill. Hades chuckles, bending to scratch the dogs behind their ears. “Took you on a walk instead, did they?” Somehow, strangely, she’s disappointed he believed her.

 

* * *

 

**IV.**

 

Years of late arrivals, years of waiting on that platform among the grey, wispy souls, aching to be away. The second the train rolls into the station she cuts off her mother’s farewell lecture with a swift cheek kiss and dashes across the platform, slipping up the stairs before Hermes has even stepped down.

“You’re late,” she hisses, shoving her valise into his chest. “Do you know what it’s like to spend an extra day in that house, let alone two more weeks?"

“Sorry, ma’am,” he sputters, looking shocked, “but usually you’re angry if we’re here on time—“

She pushes past him, stomping down the passage. “I want a drink,” she orders over her shoulder, “and I want it now!”

The souls part for her as she moves through the cars, soft and cold as mist. The guard bows to her at the door to their private compartment, his heels clicking against the dark wooden floor as he lets her through. Her husband is seated on a plush velvet bench, his overcoat folded over the back of it. An open briefcase rests between him and the window, its gut stuffed with papers and files, receipts dripping from its jaws, trying to escape. Hades’ own lap is covered, sheets spread in some haphazard system she’s gotten in trouble more than once for disrupting.

She takes the bench opposite him and crosses her legs, waiting for him to look up. He doesn’t. The good thing to do—the wifely thing to do—would be to let her husband continue his work that has absorbed him so fully he didn’t even notice the train had stopped. But being put through two more weeks of her mother’s whining and wheedling has not put Persephone in a wifely mood. She reaches a fist out and raps twice on the window. Hades’ head jerks up.

“You’re late,” she repeats, for lack of anything else she could think of. “Was it too much trouble to pick up the phone?”

“Sorry, darlin,” he sighs. “Accounts were short this last quarter after I shut down some forges, and I had to put them in order this morning to be ready for the new year. I didn’t notice the time.”

It would’ve almost sounded contrite if he didn’t immediately look back down. Persephone feels her heart soften, harden, and soften a little bit again when she remembers he’s only working double-time because she was several hundred miles away from her duty to the account books.

At least he doesn’t see her start at the pet name. Been a long time since she last heard it, is all.

She tilts her head and squints to catch a few words on what he’s working on now. “Is that a trial?” she asks, and he grunts in the affirmative. “Want some help?”

Hades’ eyebrows lift, wrinkling his forehead. “You hate trials,” he says. “You said they bore you to tears.”

Persephone frowns. “I don’t hate them. When did I say that?”

“Yes you do. Oh, geez, over a decade ago.” A note of righteous amusement creeps into his voice. “I asked you to oversee a case with me and you said, ‘What’s the point of giving every criminal in Tartarus their own punishment? Just stick them all in the inferno and stop wasting my time.’” He flips a page, dog-earing a corner. “That was the gist of it."

Persephone bites the inside of her cheek, then forces herself to stop.

“Well,” she says, “I should start overseeing them again, don’t you think? Or I’ll get rusty.” Her throat is much too dry all of a sudden. She wonders when that drink will get here. “So can I work on it? With you?”

Her husband stares at her for so long that she wonders if he’s trying to crack her open like he does with mortals, peeling back the layers with a glance, tabbing every lie and misdeed, every wrongdoing skinned through, nothing to hide from him because you can’t hide anything from him, ever. Then he shuffles his papers back in order and holds them out to her.

“Sure,” he says. “If that’s what you want.”

He snaps stiff as a board when she reseats herself next to him, plucking the stack from his fingers. Persephone pretends not to notice and is sure she fails badly at it. What a turnabout, though, to so easily call her “darlin” again and then twitch if she so much as brushes his knee. She wonders if that gives her any kind of upper hand before she remembers she’s not supposed to want the upper hand anymore.

So she scoots back a respectable inch and says, “Walk me through it,” and he does. She’d forgotten the way his voice gets when he talks about judgment, about the letter of law and right and wrong, about order and chaos. He could crack stone with that voice, he could bend steel. She underlines his few mistakes with a stubby pencil he fishes out of his overcoat for her and smoothes his bent corners with the pad of her finger.

When the train pulls into the station, Hades offers her his arm, and Persephone threads hers through it without a second thought.

 

* * *

 

**V.**

 

They fought when they were young, too. Over taking too long in the bathroom. Over leaving clothes littered across the floor. Over being late, or very late, or exactly on time, which was worse than late because it meant they didn’t care enough to be early. _Hurry,_ she would urge the wind on those still summer nights, when the air was thicker than fog and hotter than hell. _Bring me home._

They fought because everything about this kind of fighting, the married kind of fighting, was exciting and new and thrilling. When Persephone fought with her mother, there was risk, there were consequences. When Persephone fought with her husband, she knew that he would still turn out the hall light, grunt as he untied his shoes, and slip his arm around her waist before kissing her goodnight. As for Hades, nobody fought with him before her. Nobody questioned a king but the queen. And he loved it. He loved her.

He does, still. He has to, she thinks, or none of this is going to matter.

But why is it so  _hard?_  Some autumns are agonizing. Some springs are far too much of a relief. It’s a dance where for every step they move forward they take two to the back and four to the side. Persephone tries and tries and still her life isn’t one she’d have chosen all those years ago. It certainly isn’t one she’d choose now.

 

* * *

 

**VI.**

 

As usual, the nymphs are no help. They drink all her best booze and giggle into their half-empty glasses, their bobbed curls dotted with grass and dew.

“Drown him,” one suggests. “Push his face into the Styx and wait until he’s bloated and green.”

“Turn him into a rose bush for your window box,” another cuts in. “Or a begonia. Ooh, no, forsythia!” She wheezes with laughter, her rum sloshing down her chest. "He always loved gold!”

“I said we’re trying to _fix_ our marriage,” Persephone reminds them, tilting the bottle into her mouth and frowning when nothing comes out. “‘Fixing’ is not ‘killing.’”

“Killing always fixes something,” drawls a nereid, hiccuping as she sprawls over a rock, her skirt hiked up to let her long, pale legs dangle in the stream. “Doves, bulls, goats, husbands. Spill their blood to the earth and pray away your problems.”

“Pray to who?” Persephone laughs. “Everyone in charge of love and marriage and a happy home never answers my letters. My mother won’t even call my husband by his name. He’s been ‘That Man’ since the sun first rose in the sky.” Bottles clink against each other as she roots through her basket for something left with dregs still at the bottom. “Don’t even know why I bother asking, if that’s all your empty heads can come up with.”

The nereid begins to protest, but the movement of sitting up makes her wobble hard enough to slip off the rock, screeching as she splashes into the stream. The others laugh themselves hoarse, glasses shattering on the bank as they slip from their hands.

Persephone kicks her basket over, watching the empty bottles roll into the water and bob away.

There is someone she’d like to ask for advice, or at least ask to lend a kind ear. But when she passes through the meadow where that little cottage still sits, it’s as empty and barren as an open grave. She finds the dust of a dried flower crushed near the door and a yellowed song sheet crumpled into a tight ball in a long-abandoned corner. No other signs of life.

Three voices wind through the back of her head, whispering between her ears.

 ** _You know his type._**  
_**You know his kind.**  
**What did you expect to find?** _

"Shut up," Persephone says.

Before she leaves, she unscrews the cap of her flask and empties it in the brown-leafed vegetable garden, soaking the dry earth. The tomatoes ripen faster than a heartbeat. She plucks two and they bulge in her pockets, swaying with her hips. The grass turns greener, softer, like it’s taking its first breath of fresh air.

 

* * *

 

**VII.**

 

One deep winter, when snow covers the meadows and bathes the valleys, she has too much sherry before bed and decides she's tired of sleeping alone.

"I'm tired of sleeping alone,” is exactly what she announces when she shoves open his office door. Hades turns in his chair, pen still raised in his hand. For a moment the words float around him, unable to find purchase, and then when they finally land the pen rolls out of his fingers and clatters onto his desk, splashing ink onto his cuff.

“You’re what?” is his very elegant response.

“Come to bed with me.” She manages not to stumble on the carpet as she walks to him, winding her hands over his shoulders. She can feel him tense up at the contact, but she keeps at it, drawing her nails down his neck, under his jaw. “You’ve slept on that old couch in the hall for so long you’ve put a dent in it. It’s cold as ice in this house and I want to warm up. So come on.”

“Persephone,” he says, voice wavering a little as her thumb scratches the corner of his mouth, “I have to finish this by morning. I’m sorry. Tomorrow night we can—“

“You’re in charge here, aren’t you? I’m sure you can fudge a few numbers.” She starts at the first button of his shirt, the one always hardest to pry undone beneath his collar.

But he pulls her hands off, twisting away. “I’m serious. I have to get this work done. And I don’t think we—we should go down that road right now. We can talk about it in the morning.”

It’s something about the way he says it, so authoritative, so decisive, that snaps something inside her.

She picks up his inkwell and pitches it to the floor. Black bleeds across the carpet, the glass base clanking as it rolls across the floorboards. Hades looks as if he’s been doused with freezing water.

“Talk about it!” she screams. “Talk about what? We never talk about _shit,_ Hades! Every year I come back hoping that this’ll be it, this’ll be the year you actually give a damn! Every year I hope that finally, you’ll try! And every year I get nothing, I get silence and paperwork and the thrill of having a husband who won’t even touch me!” She kicks the inkwell from its puddle, sending it flying across the room. “So we’re not going to talk about it in the morning, because you’re never going to talk to me about anything!"

The quiet rings in her ears. Slowly, achingly slowly, her husband stands.

“So that’s what you really think,” he says. "That you’re the only one trying.” He starts to say something else but all that comes from his throat is a strangled sound—a laugh? A sob? He rubs his face with one hand, pinching the bridge of his nose, looking somewhere over her left shoulder.

“I’m a fool. Nothing is ever going to change.” There is such solemnity in his voice, such heavy sorrow, that he sounds like he’s speaking from the bottom of the sea. “Go home, Persephone.”

Of all things, she finds it somewhere within herself to be shocked. “I—it’s January,” she sputters. “I can’t go yet, I can’t leave before—before—“

A long time ago, so early in their marriage that the ring still itched on her finger, she witnessed her husband rain down judgment on a soul that crossed him. He was loud enough to make the ceiling tremble, and Persephone covered her ears and ran upstairs. She threw her things back into her ratty carpetbag and would have run all the way back north again, back to her mother’s rickety porch and her sweet-smelling kitchen, back to a place she loved to hate rather than face this man with death spilling from his throat, this stranger. She’d gotten as far as the bottom of the stairs before she lost her nerve.

This Hades may as well be a stranger too. When he turns around, there’s no death spilling from him. There is nothing. He is hollow. He speaks in a whisper drier than leaves dancing over the pavement.

_“Go.”_

She doesn’t pack anything this time. She walks out the front door in her dressing gown, boots shoved on her bare feet.

 

* * *

 

**VIII.**

 

She’s too ashamed to go see her mother, though she knows she can’t put it off forever. Already the snow is beginning to melt, summer birds hopping from frozen branch to frozen branch in confusion. Instead she hires a cab to take her through the woods until the narrow road ends at a single, stalwart cabin.

Artemis opens the door just a crack when she knocks, but after one glance at Persephone she throws it open wide.

“I was wondering why my dogs were bringing home rabbits that should still be underground,” she drawls. “You look like shit. I’ll put on coffee.”

The cabin smells like old, damp wood and smoke, and for a moment even the hint of soot reminds her so much of Hadestown that she can feel her muscles tense. Artemis throws a dusty quilt around her shoulders and pushes a hot mug into her hands as the dogs circle around them, their thin tails whipping back and forth.

“It’s medicinal,” she says with a wink when Persephone gags at how much bourbon has been mixed in. “So, why the sudden change in the weather?”

Persephone takes a larger gulp of the coffee, the bourbon no longer an impediment.

“There was a boy who came down, a little while ago,” she says. “Name of Orpheus."

It takes a while to get through the whole story. Persephone goes through several cups of bitter coffee as she tells it, a dull warmth settling in her stomach from the bourbon. When she’s through with the tale, Artemis lets her go on ranting for another half-hour after that, all her frustrations with her husband unleashed like ash to the wind, lessening the weight in her chest and angering her all the same.

“It’s like he’s under some kind of curse that keeps him from telling me anything, from making any decision! He can’t even decide which kind of awful his town should be,” she snaps. “For centuries he cranked it up hotter and hotter like he wanted to boil me alive, and the coal fires glowed so bright I couldn’t sleep. Now the ground freezes over every night and every factory is a mile off from the house! It’s so dark I may as well live on the other side of the moon!”

Artemis studies her, her fingers tapping against her steaming tin cup.

“Seph,” she sighs, “sometimes I think you talk so much you don’t even hear yourself. Listen: you complain that Hadestown is too hot, and then you complain when Hades turns off the heat. The factories are too bright, but when he shuts them down it’s too dark. What do you want your husband to do? Rebuild his city every morning after you decide what color you want the sky to be?”

“That’s not what I meant—“ Persephone starts, and then freezes.

_So that’s what you really think. That you’re the only one trying._

“Now, I don’t spend too much time with men who aren’t my preening peacock of a brother,” Artemis says, taking a swig of her coffee, “but it sounds to me like Hades thought his best course of action was to stop shouting back at you and start listening. And then, surprise, he got confused when he did exactly what you wanted and you still weren’t satisfied."

“But—but—“ Persephone shakes her head, her loose curls quivering. “But moving the factories, shutting down forges, stepping away from me—that’s not what I really wanted!”

Artemis raises an eyebrow. “And did you ever _tell him_ what you really wanted?”

For a moment, she sits and thinks it over. But it must be far longer than that, for when she looks down at her mug Persephone realizes it’s long gone cold.

The dogs dart off into the snow when she opens the door, chasing each other through the trees. Artemis hugs her tight before she leaves, her warm hands rubbing circles on her back.

“Come on now,” she says, kissing her on the forehead, “I know you’ll find a way. You found a way down south, and you made a bargain to make your mother happy, and you wriggled your country bum onto a throne right under everybody’s noses.” She whistles to her dogs as they walk to the still-waiting cab. “It’ll be alright. You’re a mighty fine queen, Seph. You just gotta keep trying.”

“If you weren’t my favorite cousin, I’d hit you right now,” Persephone sniffs. “The next person who tells me I 'just gotta keep trying’ is getting sent to the bottom of the Styx.”

Artemis cackles, waving at her from the path until the cab rounds the corner and she’s hidden by the trees.

 

* * *

 

**IX.**

 

It takes a while to find the perfect place. It has to be neutral ground, private, meaningful, and somewhere her mother would never go looking. She decides on a little café deep into the city that hosts new musicians on Friday nights. It’s a little high-brow for her tastes and a little low-brow for Hades’, but the pianist isn’t half-bad and there’s a back table where you can’t be overheard. She likes the high, gilded ceiling, a relic from an age where people could still afford to go out every weekend to see and be seen. It reminds her of the first mine her husband ever showed her: a cave with walls dripping in veins of gold and glittering quartz that he’d dug with a pick and his own two hands.

She left a message with one of his clerks; she was worried that if she called his private line, he’d just say no. But now she wonders if he’d be more convinced to hear her voice. She’s so nervous that she can’t even make herself feel drunk, despite tipping back glass after glass. _Please,_ she thinks, looking over her shoulder again and again, _please come for me, just one more time._

A hush falls over the room as the door swings open and a god walks in.

He takes the chair opposite her. The pianist’s fingers dance over the keys and Persephone wonders if the man can hear her heart from across the room, it’s beating so fast and loud. Surely Hades can hear it. Surely Hades still knows her through and through.

“Persephone,” he says.

“Hades,” she says. She has to pause to wet her lips. Her mouth feels like it’s filled with sand, her tongue as flat and dry as a baked riverbed in the sun. “Hades, I’m so sorry.”

Her husband may as well be a statue, for all the reaction he shows. Persephone digs her fingers into the tablecloth, unable to stop fidgeting.

“I’m sorry for what I said. For everything I said. You were trying, I see that now, and I should’ve seen it earlier. I just—I just don’t know why it’s so goddamn difficult. For both of us.” She laughs bitterly, tears stinging in her eyes. “Don’t you ever think that? I mean, hell, I’m sure Hera could take me to task, but shouldn’t we be better than this? Wiser with age, or some shit? I feel like I’m a kid again, sitting here crying over some scrap at the dance hall, only the night never ends and I never get to grow up.”

The tablecloth is wrinkled now beneath her nails. “You don’t have to take me back,” she says. “January or not. I don’t want to force things anymore. I just want to talk. About anything. Everything. Would that—“ she swallows the lump in her throat, “—would that be alright?”

She jumps a little at the touch—she can’t help it. No one touches her like he does. No one ever has, no one ever will. Hades’ hand pulls hers away from fiddling the tablecloth to death and with every brush of his calloused skin against her palm she feels blanketed by the calm of something ancient, something sure. Here is the hand that plucked the lot of All Down Below, the hand that broke granite and slate and marble into the shape of a city. Here is the hand that took hers at the beginning of time and slid one thin band onto her finger, no matter that her nails were caked in dirt.

“That’s alright,” he rasps, pressing her fingers tight between his. “That’s alright with me.”

In the distance, a few tables and a thousand miles away, the pianist begins to sing.

Turn out they haven’t run out of words after all.

 

* * *

 

**X.**

 

Some hours later, a bassist joins the stage and Persephone’s foot starts tapping beneath the table, her heels unable to keep still.

“Absolutely not,” Hades denies, giving the duo on stage a withering glance. “I’ve heard better sets from alley cats in heat.” When she squeezes his hand and pouts, he puts on a great show of sighing and rolling his eyes before he lets her pull him to the dance floor.

They don’t move very gracefully, or very much at all. The song is slow and lulling, a song for the other couples in the café to snuggle in close and tight and get excited for the night ahead. For Hades and Persephone, it’s a song for relearning how to not step on toes, how to fit your hands onto your husband’s shoulders without digging in too much. How to remember what rhythm feels like when you’re not moving alone.

“This is why I stay underground year round,” Hades mutters when the bass solo goes on far longer than it should, and winks when she pinches him.

“You should visit up here more often. I want to see you sooner than September.” The space between his neck and shoulder still smells the same, a blend of clean wool and smoke and the cologne she bought him one anniversary that he swears doesn’t smell as bad as it does. Her voice is hoarse from airing so many years of grievances across their table, from untangling so many knots and fears. She feels slightly drunk—at last—but better than that, she feels light. Freed. “We could travel. See the ocean, the mountains.” She giggles against his collar. “Find that field you proposed in and spend the night.”

“Sounds nice,” he says. She can feel the flush burning up his neck and oh, what a feeling it is. “But I’ll have to book a hotel room afterward, otherwise I’ll be confined to that attic bedroom alone.”

Ah. “Don’t worry about her. I’ll sort it out.”

Hades fakes a shiver. “Now there’s a storm I’d rather steer clear of. One country woman facing the wrath of the Dread Queen.”

She grins. “Surely big bad Mr. Hades isn’t afraid of some little farm girl he picked up from a roadside stand?”

“On the contrary,” he says with a rueful smile, “that little farm girl still terrifies him."

 _I’m afraid I can’t keep you,_ he told her, face lit by the candle flickering between their silverware. _I’m afraid of the day you’ll inevitably decide to never come back._ She lifts her head from his shoulder and looks at her husband, tall and stiff and so very weary, tired down to his very bones.

“I wish—“ Persephone says, and stops, because she wishes too many things. She wishes they hadn’t married so young and stupid. She wishes they hadn’t let things go on like this for so long. She wishes her husband were kinder, that she were more patient, that they both were less stubborn and less resentful and less prone to holding tight to the edge of the knife no matter how deep it cut.

She wishes she were a different kind of goddess—one who was not eternally bound to never fully belong anywhere, to anyone. It stifles her, all the things she wishes. She clenches her hands in her husband’s shirt and tries not to notice how her fingers tremble.

Hades tightens his arms around her and rests his chin atop her head.

“I know,” he whispers, low and sweet and sad enough to break her heart. “I know, darlin, I know.”

 

* * *

 

**XI.**

 

When her mother returns from the market, arms full of turnips and carrots and a bushel of apples large enough to feed a whole family, Persephone is already seated at the table, hands folded atop the faded tablecloth and ankles crossed neatly under her chair.

“Ma,” she says, “I love you.” She smiles. "But I think it’s time I found my own place for the summer.”

 

* * *

 

**XII.**

 

Here is a story you may have heard before:

Deep in the countryside, not quite south but not too far from it, there’s a little cottage with white shutters and a green door. No one can remember who exactly lived there before, but there’s a woman who rents it now for half the year. She’s young enough that her hair is still a bright copper brown, but old enough that the corners of her eyes wrinkle when she smiles. Her vegetable garden is the best for miles, with tomatoes bigger than a man’s fist and strawberries redder than blood. You can take anything you like, she says, so long as it’s not more than what you need.

She serves sweet spiked tea and mint juleps on the porch when neighbors stop by, to fight the summer heat. Her door is always open, save for two occasions: the first being she’s locked the gate and closed the shutters, a hand-scrawled note explaining that she’s gone to visit her mother for the weekend. The second being if a black car, long and sleek, prowls down the old dirt road, its windows darker than night.

When that car comes, you might glimpse a man stepping out of it and rapping on the cottage doorframe, taking off his glasses just before he steps inside. The cottage door will be shut tight in the evening, but sounds trickle through the open windows as the lace curtains dance in the breeze: the clink of glasses, the scratch of a gramophone player on a worn record, soft laughter and the slow purr of an old, old song. The next day the car will be gone and the woman will water her garden in bare feet, humming as she brushes her hands along the trunk of her olive tree.

As the sun begins to set a little sooner and the winds start to change, the woman will lock the cottage door and set down the road with a warm coat on her shoulders and a silk scarf tied around her hair, swinging a valise from one arm and a corked bottle in the other. The farmhands call from the fields as she passes—“Stay, ma’am, stay!”—but she’ll laugh them off, quickening her pace.

“Sorry, boys,” she’ll say, “but there’s a train coming, and I hate to be late.”

She might pass off one or two apples to the beggars at the station. She might sit on one of the benches and chat with another traveler, dig out a small compact from her valise to fix her hair, or hop from foot to foot, checking the station clock with an impatience bordering on fury. But then with two short shrieks of the whistle the train will slow to a crawl down the track, smoke billowing overhead, and she’ll hand off her valise to a porter as she makes her way to the final car.

When her husband steps down, she’ll throw her arms around his neck, laughing when he lifts her up and then quickly he sets her down, groaning about his back. She’ll kiss him soundly on the mouth even if people are watching—and usually, they are—and whisper something in his ear that even those brushing past can’t hear. But her husband can, and he’ll smile and take her hand, and together they’ll board the train.

And the story doesn’t always go quite like that. But tell it again, and it might surprise you.

**Author's Note:**

> I have wanted to write some form of this fic probably for seven-ish years now, and honestly it's a wild feeling to have finally done it?!?! Starting 2018 with my best old anguished married het foot forward!!!
> 
> I also raise my cup to the following four heroes:
> 
> 1\. Marie (@operamatic) who changed my life around 2011 by recommending the original album to me, and then changed it again in 2016 by stalling Anais Mitchell long enough in the NYTW lobby that I could get 30 seconds to gush at her.
> 
> 2\. Mer (@meredyd) who has let me gab endlessly about this show over Twitter for well over a year now, and who would follow me faithfully into any fiery musical inferno with utmost grace and correct opinions and crows.
> 
> 3\. Emma (@singasong119) who is probably the only human on earth as obsessed with this music as I am, and skilled enough with a needle to make the Fates jealous. 
> 
> 4\. Amber Gray, who in June 2016 growled and circled Patrick Page like a jackal onstage, looking like she could not decide whether she wanted to kill him with her bare hands or jump his bones, and this moment lit a fire within my soul that will never be extinguished. Praise be to Our Lady of the Underground who played my favorite role better than I had ever dreamed it could be played, amen… :')
> 
> For your reference, "Goddess of Binding" and Persephone's role as the Hadestown bookkeeper in this fic refers to the fact that Persephone and Hades were the most popular gods called upon in ancient Greek binding (inhibiting) curses and spells. In addition, most of these typically were worded along the lines of, "I call upon Hades, God of the Underworld, and The Dread Queen of Hell, She Who Must Not Be Named, Please Do Not Smite Me Oh Powerful One." If you don't believe me, you can read several dozens of them in [this textbook!](https://www.amazon.com/Magic-Witchcraft-Ghosts-Greek-Worlds/dp/0195385209/?tag=aboutcom02thoughtco-20)
> 
> (Hermes, god of transportation and travel, is the likely culprit for the God of Trains, so blame the schedule problems on him.)


End file.
